Local expert working on historic Yarmouth church clock

Sunday

Mar 12, 2017 at 6:00 AM

Conor Powers-Smith csmith@wickedlocal.com

When the time came to remove and rebuild the steeple of the South Yarmouth United Methodist Church, the committee overseeing the project knew exactly who should be trusted to remove, refurbish, and reinstall the historic building’s large antique clock.

“I used to do a lot of these,” said Barry Hutchinson, owner of Time Flies, a Brewster business specializing in cleaning, repairing, and maintaining clocks and watches. “I kind of got away from it. I got talked into doing this one.”

Hutchinson has been maintaining the clock, which dates to the 1850s, for decades. His familiarity with it, and the fact that he was local, made the committee’s choice clear. Convincing Hutchinson of that took some doing, though. “I’m retired from doing tower clocks,” he said. “Since I know this clock in detail, I agreed to take this on as my last tower clock project.”

The church, on Old Main Street in South Yarmouth, is undergoing a major upgrade paid for in part by Community Preservation Act funds. In Early December, the steeple was removed and is being reconstructed. An earlier phase of the work involved interior and exterior renovations to the historic church.

Part of the reason Hutchinson retired is the amount of work that goes into a project like this one. The church’s clock had to be partially disassembled on the site (after the steeple had been removed), and the larger parts hauled to the ground with a crane. When it comes time to reinstall the clock, it will be in pieces too, a process that calls for a great deal of planning and precision.

“It’s difficult to move in one piece, because it’s connected to the building,” Hutchinson said. “Just the way it was constructed, it was put in probably before the thing was constructed.”

The clock saw significant changes before Hutchinson’s day. “This was originally pendulum driven,” he said. “This one’s been electrical as long as I’ve been working on it, and that’s been 30 years.”

The restored clock will not only run, Hutchinson said, but will be noticeably less drab and weathered. “It’s not going to be dirty, dark green, it’s going to be bright green with gold trim, it’s going to be painted the way it was originally.”

Getting there is a long process. “It’s been going a couple months now, I’ve probably got another month on it,” Hutchinson said. Each part needs to be carefully cleaned, and many require further attention to return them to their original state. “It’s the machine work that really takes time.”

While most of the original parts are still usable, some, especially those exposed to the elements, need to be replaced. Luckily, Hutchinson has been saving clock parts his whole career, and has some on hand.

Hutchinson has been on the Cape and in business since leaving the Navy in 1972. During that time he has seen a number of changes in his industry, which has contracted into a smaller niche than it occupied when he began.

“These days there aren’t many school-trained people around,” said Hutchinson. “There aren’t many schools left.” He himself has trained 17 people over the course of his career, none of whom are still in the industry.

With the omnipresence of digital technology, mechanical watches have increasingly become specialty items. Not so for timepieces like grandfather clocks. “A horrendous amount of clocks out there,” Hutchinson said. While that leads to many repair jobs—either in his workshop or, more often in the case of grandfather clocks, as house calls—it has also sharply reduced the price Hutchinson can charge, since the values of the clocks themselves have plateaued.

“With the internet, a lot of values on antiques in general, not just clocks, has dropped, because there are more out there than we realized,” Hutchinson said. But money was never his prime motivation for indulging a curiosity that goes back to his childhood. “It’s something I was interested in, I was one of those kids who had to take everything apart and figure out how it worked.”

It’s that continuing fascination that convinced Hutchinson to take on one last tower clock project. “Half of it is just my love of doing it,” he said. “If I were just trying to make money at this I would’ve gotten out of it a long time ago.”